Free Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

over the arm of a silk settee as if she might be sick. Someone ought to put a bucket under her. In a corner, a sober quartet is playing a round of bridge. Laughter, melodious and feminine, returns her attention to the porch.
    “Floyd Holmes, I think,” Dickie says.
    “I don’t even know him.”
    “No, of course you don’t.”
    It is the eighteenth or twentieth party Vivian has been to since arriving at the Highland. Some of the parties have been at the hotel itself, and others, such as this one, have been held at the cottages along the beach and then have moved on to one of the grand houses around the point or to the country club nearer to the center of the village. The guest lists include nearly all of the same people. Cedric Nye and his wife, Natalie, up from Raleigh, North Carolina. The brothers Chadbourne, Nat and Hunt, who invented a ball bearing that has made them millions. Cyril Whittemore, a radio actor whose mid-Atlantic accent is so pitch perfect that it’s impossible to tell which side of the ocean he is from. Dorothy Trafton, whom Vivian knows from Boston, and whom she avoids as best she can because Dorothy was present at a tennis match at which Vivian, thoroughly fed up with Teddy Rice’s arrogance, threw a racquet across the court and dinged Teddy on the ankle. And there’s Harlan Quigley, from New York, and Joshua Cutts, who lives here year round, and Georgia Porter, from Washington (her father is a senator? a representative?), and Arthur Willet, who is said to have millions from a diamond mine in South Africa. His wife, Verna, wears sapphires as a statement of independence.
    Honestly, if only they could all go naked, Vivian thinks. She has on the least amount of clothing she can possibly get away with — a meringue sundress with no back and made of such thin, gauzy material that it’s nearly indecent (only two beige grosgrain ribbons keep it up) — and still tiny rivulets of perspiration trickle from her neck to her breasts. She has already run through all her dresses and will have to start again. Dickie, after an enigmatic absence of two weeks, about which he has so far said little, showed up just the week before, announcing cheerfully that his engagement was broken. The announcement didn’t surprise Vivian, since she and Dickie have been together almost every day since that first morning on the beach, but
why
they are together remains a mystery to her. They certainly don’t love each other, and she isn’t sure they even like each other very much. They quarrel occasionally when drunk, and once they argued publicly at a dinner party at the Nyes’, an argument that ended when Vivian called him a lush and Dickie deliberately dropped his highball onto the tiles of the Nyes’ kitchen floor, Edinburgh crystal and all. Dickie was profusely apologetic within seconds of the stunt, but she sensed in both of them a certain pleasure in the event. And in that way, she thinks, they are similar types.
    “I’m not sure I’ll like drinking as much when it’s legal,” Vivian says as they make their way around the back of the cottage to Dickie’s car.
    “Oh, not at all,” Dickie says. “Not at all. Imagine being able to walk into a corner grocery store and buy a bottle of gin. It’ll have all the glamour of, I don’t know, Moxie.”
    “It’ll never happen,” Vivian says.
    Dickie starts the engine of his new car, a particularly low-slung Packard. Vivian lays her head back against the seat. The rush of air that the car produces is worth the trip. “Don’t stop,” Vivian says.
    “We could drive to Montreal,” he says.
    He is joking, but the idea appeals to her nevertheless. She imagines the drive north through the night, slipping through the mountains, the air growing cooler and cooler until finally they have to shut the windows. And then they will be in Quebec and no one will speak English and that in itself would be heaven.
    Dickie rounds the point and pulls up to a house clearly in mid repair.